Gloria Charmian Duffy (born September 4, 1953) is a former U.S. Department of Defense official, businesswoman, social entrepreneur and nonprofit executive.

Since 1996, she has been the president, CEO and a member of the Board of Governors of the Commonwealth Club of California, America's largest and oldest public forum, founded in 1903.

[4] In February, 2022 Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi appointed Duffy to be a member of the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States.

Duffy has had a varied career, including research, journalism, education, business, management, scientific collaboration and research funding, philanthropy, public service at the local and national levels, defense and arms control policy, international arms negotiations, conflict resolution and real estate management and development.

Duffy was associated for 38 years with CISAC at Stanford, returning as a fellow in residence from 1985 to 1987 and from 1995 to 1996, teaching, participating in several policy research projects and leading one of them, and editing/authoring two books.

[9] She also spoke about the impact of the Arms Control Program's founder, and CISAC's first co-director, Dr. John Lewis, at a conference commemorating his legacy, held at Stanford in January, 2018.

[10] In 1982, Duffy become the first executive director of a start-up organisation, Ploughshares Fund, a public foundation initiated in San Francisco by philanthropist Sally Lilienthal, former Nixon Administration official Lewis H. Butler and others.

She was executive director, 1982–1984, setting up initial grantmaking guidelines and procedures, helping to shape the funding priorities and process, and undertaking a number of special projects.

[11] Demonstrating the verifiability of a low-threshold nuclear test ban enabled the United Nations to adopt the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty in 1996.

In 1985, Duffy founded the independent research institute Global Outlook, based in Palo Alto, California which focused on US-Soviet relations and international security in the nuclear age.

Global Outlook undertook research, public policy advising and public education on issues including arms control treaty compliance and dispute resolution, the political psychology of the nuclear arms race, the sources and implications of "new thinking" about international relations under the Gorbachev leadership in the Soviet Union and verification of a chemical weapons treaty.

Global Outlook also worked with new parliamentary leaders in the former Soviet countries to assist in their transition to civil society and civilian oversight of national security.

Global Outlook's project on arms control compliance led to a 1987 hearing before the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs on the validity of cases the Reagan Administration was making that the Soviet Union was cheating on arms control agreements, at which Duffy and other Stanford and Global Outlook experts testified.

These include Global Outlook Senior Research Associate and psychologist Dr. Steven Kull who founded and leads several public opinion research organizations, including Voice of the People; Deputy Director Greg Dalton who founded and heads Climate One, at the Commonwealth Club; Global Outlook Deputy Director Dr. Ruth Shapiro, who founded and has headed several organizations, including the Center for Asian Philanthropy and Society in Hong Kong; Global Outlook Deputy Director Leslie Saul Garvin went on to work in positions at 3Com and Siemans Corporations and at TechNet, and is a Senior Program Officer at the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford University; Leonid Zagalsky, a Russian journalist who joined Global Outlook in 1992 after his Knight Fellowship at Stanford, became a Contributing Editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and a project coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists, then returned to Russia to produce independent films.

Dr. Matthew State], a research associate at Global Outlook, who is Chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco; Dr. Karen Peabody O'Brien], a research associate at Global Outlook, who went on to work for the W. Alton Jones Foundation, and founded the Advancing Green Chemistry Institute, and Dr. Kiron Skinner, research associate at Global Outlook, who was the Director of Policy Planning at the US Department of State, co-authored two books on President Ronald Reagan, and is the founding Director of the Institute for Politics and Strategy at Carnegie Mellon University.

Washington Post columnist Al Kamen joked in his In The Loop column that she had the longest title of any Clinton Administration appointee.

[19] With Ambassador James Goodby and other colleagues, she completed over fifty agreements with these countries for dismantling and disposing of their weapons of mass destruction,[20][21] managing a $400 million annual budget.

The initial purpose was to provide employment in civilian scientific research to former Soviet WMD scientists who were unemployed or underemployed, and whose skills might be in demand by countries or groups seeking to obtain weapons of mass destruction.

[25] Duffy began her work on equity and justice by volunteering for Wilson Riles in his campaign for California State Superintendent of Public Instruction, while in high school in 1970.

She turned the interviews for her academic research into a four-part series of articles for The Occidental Weekly, arguing that the hardline and racist white attitudes she documented would lead to conflict and violence.

The series, titled "The Country that Doesn't Exist," won a Los Angeles Press Club student journalism award, in 1974.

In 1987, she co-founded the World Forum of Silicon Valley, based in San Jose, to host dialogue among different communities about global issues.

Duffy has been a mediator and in conflict resolution initiatives including a 1998 effort working, together with Stanford colleagues Alexander Dallin and Gail Lapidus and Ambassador James Goodby, with the national security advisors to the presidents of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia to build trust and reduce hostility among the three countries.

−Duffy was for seven years a board director and treasurer of the Compton Foundation, funding on environmental, population and peace issues, where she stewarded the management of $120 million in assets.

For example, in 1993, she spoke at the Arab and Israeli-attended Ginosar Conference in Tel Aviv on possible application of treaty verification measures developed in East–West arms control to Middle East security agreements.

[35][36][37][38] She is working to establish more stringent local rules of court for probate in California counties that do not currently require attorneys to justify their fees as benefitting a protected person or their estate.

Rod Diridon Jr. served two terms on the Santa Clara City Council, and is currently senior manager of state and local government affairs/West for Apple Inc.

[49] The Book Gallery was founded to create business and employment in McCloud as an alternative to the proposed building of a large water-bottling plant that would have negatively impacted the streams and groundwater at the top of the CA watershed.